Samuel Tongue

Each afternoon I watched her coming back through the hot stony field after swimming, the sea light behind her and the huge sky on the other side of that.

I believe Icarus was not failing as he fell, but just coming to the end of his triumph.

The first thing that we noted with this piece was the killer first line.

It was a great first line to really draw you in.

Everyone forgets that Icarus also flew.

That kind of upending of the mythology and the interpretation that's kind of crystallized around Icarus as the kind of ultimate in hubris.

He flew too close to the sun.

And his pride, yeah, his pride and his hubris brings him down.

With this, yeah, this kind of twist, everyone forgets that Icarus also flew before he fell or before he failed, as the title has here, failing and flying.

The poem just kind of hinges on that exploration of how do we know whether someone or a situation is failing or whether it's actually flying or whether the perspective that interlocutors or interpreters have on the situation might not be the correct one.

There's questions throughout.

How can they say the marriage failed?

There's this sense that the poem is speaking outside of itself, out to an audience or to a judging kind of looker-in.

And not providing necessarily answers, but saying that how can you say that the marriage failed or this situation is all about failure?

In the group, we were obviously, as I say, struck by the first line, but also the kind of conclusion, as it were, where the poet writes, but anything worth doing is worth doing badly.

And again, we spent quite a bit of time on that line because it's not the received wisdom.

Anything worth doing is worth doing well is obviously the kind of Victoriana interpretation or phrasing of those lines.

But here he's saying anything worth doing is worth doing badly.

What does that mean?

Is that an echo of Samuel Beckett's Fail Better?